Skyrim Modding Diary - 24 March 2022
Entry posted by gregaaz in Modding Diary - March 2022
571 views
Good morning, folks! After thinking on it for a while, I've decided to more or less lock my configuration at this point for the next adventure. I've started regenerating the grass cache and as long as nothing goes wrong, I won't be installing any more mods that touch the exterior worldspace. I say "as long as nothing goes wrong" because I did a bit of an experiment last night - I merged three major grass mods plus several smaller ones - and I won't know if it worked right until I finish generating the grass cache. So we'll see! If I do have to redo the cache, I have one late breaking exterior mod that I might squeeze in.
We're starting the day with 1,560 mods installed, 1,511 plugins active, and a final load order index of ED. This is likely to be more or less the size of the mod stack when I go into MCM setup tomorrow - so we didn't quite make it to 1600 this time around, but we've still got a substantial increase in complexity compared to the second adventure, which kicked off with about 300 fewer mods installed.
So How Does The Grass Look?
Not bad. I'm seeing lots of subtle variation with no real eyesores. Frame rate appears to be consistent even in areas with very heavy grass such as seen below. All in all I think we can mark down this grass move as at least a tentative success. I am still noticing some wiggle on the models from Leaves As Grass, and since that one's just a straight-up replacer I'm going to uninstall it. At the same time we'll unhide the models from Verdant so we still benefit from enhanced models. Some of the other mods already provide some leaf cover options, so we won't be completely losing the feature in any event.
Late Breaking Additions
Three mods caught my eye this morning that I'm going to slide into the configuration: Civil War Officers, Wares of Tamrie - Rare Curios, and Vyn Exports - Ice Claws. None of these should require me to remake the grass cache or my LODs, so I expect they'll be safe additions. None of the three mods have any issues with conflicting assets, so we can move on to xEdit. The plugins are already all compacted, and had no errors or navmesh edge link corruption. I did find a few ITMs in the ice claws mod, consisting of orphaned top level cell data. If you've been following this series, you've probably already heard me complaining about this, but just to emphasize - leaving these seemingly harmless records in the file and not cleaning them means that an end user who installs this mod without cleaning it themselves will lose the benefits of lighting, water, and music mods that load before this. Wrye Bash will probably catch and fix the conflict, but why risk it when it takes literally two seconds to clean the ITMs? I wish more authors would be dilligent about this.
Removing: EvergreenGroveExterior [CELL:00009BE0] (in Tamriel "Skyrim" [WRLD:0000003C] at -13,-17)
Removing: PrideofTelVosExterior01 [CELL:0000B289] (in Tamriel "Skyrim" [WRLD:0000003C] at 33,25)
Removing: [CELL:0000982E] (in Tamriel "Skyrim" [WRLD:0000003C] at 31,-21)
Removing: WhiterunExterior01 [CELL:0000961B] (in Tamriel "Skyrim" [WRLD:0000003C] at 4,-3)
For the ice claw mod, all the conflicts involved top level cell data and were pretty easy to patch up. The officer's mod is a little more complicated - not because of any defect in the mod but because of the need to incorporate it into my existing, private edits to the Imperial leveled lists. Let's dump this mod's leveled lists and NPCs into a working file along with my customized leveled lists.
With the other lists now at our fingertips, let's integrate them. Imperial officers aren't going to use my Imperial officer armor lists, since those are geared towards field grade officers, but they will use the Imperial officer weapon list. Stormcloak officers are going to be the opposite situation - they'll get access to the officer armor list but use the normal weapon lists.
After tweaking the leveled item lists and adding them to my conflict resolution patch I looked at the NPC and outfit records and pleasantly discovered they did not require any further edits. I did need to merge some changes between the USSEP, Skyrim at War, and this mod for the random encounter with Imperials escorting a prisoner, but it was just a matter of merging otherwise non-conflicting edits within the one record.
I took a little walk around Whiterun Hold to see if I could luck out and run into some of the new NPCs, but it wasn't meant to be today. Guess we'll just have to keep an eye out during the upcoming adventure.
Some Finishing Touches
As I alluded to earlier, I rebuilt my LODs after the grass cache. The operation went smoothly, with no differences from the times I've documented it earlier in this blog. I also integrated Consistent Older People, which is out of print on the Nexus but can be found on AFKMods. I was a bit concerned that this might cause dark face bug, but it did not - which is great. In fact, this reveals an opportunity to make a much less invasive solution for a sticking point I've had with Hateful Wenches. Unless I get really motivated tomorrow, that won't make it into the mod stack for the next adventure, but it'll get the changes into the next build a lot faster.
Well, I probably should have known that this seemed a little too easy. It looks like I need to manually change over the head textures to the elder textures.
As you can see, the normal map for the elder head texture doesn't match up with the one in the facegen. Let's swap out the normal path and see how it looks in game after.
Look at the huge difference that makes! I don't really feel like patching all the nifs today, but I'll have to take care of this tomorrow before I start the next round of gameplay.
The other item on the docket is More Interesting Loot Reborn. This is a 4500-record mod, so it's not a candidate for compacting without splitting up the file. This is a fairly mature mod that's been around for a long time, so I wasn't surprised when it came back more or less clean. There was some anomalous perk data I need to keep an eye on, but otherwise I was able to move on to conflict resolution pretty promptly. The conflicts were kind of all over the place, so I'll need to scrutinize them to make sure I'm not looking at wild edits that'll cause problems. Fortunately, reviewing everything just required some patience and a lot of dragging and dropping in xEdit.
You know what? Speaking in leveled list stuff, let's also take care of Marco's Integrated Leveled Lists. This one isn't going to keep all its changes in my game forever, because I'm eyeing a couple of other mods that tackle specific aspects of this one in greater detail and with better lore friendliness - but for now, this will work great and some of its other features are perfect matches.
Tomorrow I'll need to refit the rest of the elder facegen, and after that... it's MCM setup time for the next adventure!
OK, we're getting very close to the point when we can start the next adventure! See you all tomorrow 
7 Comments
Recommended Comments